2010Q3 Reports: ACL Wiki

ACL Wiki for Computational Linguistics - Report for 2010

Peter Turney peter.turney@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

[June 10, 2010]

The ACL Wiki opened to the public on October 18th, 2006. The mandate of the wiki is to facilitate the sharing of information on all aspects of Computational Linguistics. The ACL Wiki includes pointers to corpora, software, journals, conferences, workshops, blogs, researcher home pages, state-of-the-art system comparisons, employment opportunities, course descriptions, and many other resources for computational linguists.

The following table summarizes the growth of the wiki. The number of page views has increased each year. The yearly number of page edits has been constant, with a shift from the creation of new pages to the refinement and expansion of existing pages. Current statistics are available online on the Wiki.

Year

Cumulative page views

Yearly page views

Daily page views

Cumulative edits

Yearly edits

Daily edits

Number of long pages

2010

1,230,000

480,000

1,315

8,000

2,000

5

293

2009

750,000

400,000

1,095

6,000

2,000

5

267

2008

350,000

250,000

685

4,000

2,000

5

235

2007

100,000

100,000

275

2,000

2,000

5

100

The wiki hosts two Community Portals, the Natural Language Generation Portal and the Textual Entailment Portal. Both portals contain a wealth of useful information for researchers in these communities. Community Portals are an excellent tool for supporting a community of researchers who share a common interest in a specific problem.

The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity has now used the ACL Wiki as its home page for two years, CALC-09 and CALC-10. Other workshops and conferences may also find it convenient to use the ACL Wiki to host their pages. The advantages include easy setup, easy editing, stability, archiving, and a recognized and respected URL.

There are many interesting and useful pages in the ACL Wiki, covering a wide range of material, which makes it difficult to summarize the wiki. A good starting point for exploration might be the List of resources by language, which covers more than 50 different languages. Another useful resource is the List of NLP/CL courses.

All members of ACL are strongly encouraged to contribute to the ACL Wiki. Whatever subfield of Computational Linguistics you work in, this is your opportunity to raise the profile of research in your area. The time you invest in the ACL Wiki will have high returns for the community.